UOC hierarch calls on Local Churches for urgent dialogue to overcome crisis of conciliarity

Metropolitan Luke of Zaporizhzhia and Melitopol stated the need for an immediate start of a dialogue between the Local Churches to develop a conciliar mechanism for responding to current challenges. The bishop warned that without the restoration of living communion, world Orthodoxy risks becoming an analog of the United Nations, a structure devoid of real levers to maintain peace and unity.

In an interview with the Serbian edition «Zivot Crkve » published on May 25, 2026, Vladyka emphasized that the cessation of Eucharistic communion between the largest Churches, caused, in particular, by the «Ukrainian issue,» turned the one Church into an arena of political confrontation. According to the Metropolitan, today Orthodoxy often looks like a «confederation of warring religious corporations,» where the preaching of Christ is replaced by «political Orthodoxy» or ethnophyletism.

Metropolitan Luke paid special attention to the problem of interpreting church rules. He noted that the unilateral actions of individual hierarchs, such as lifting anathemas and invading other people’s canonical territories, ignore the conciliar mind. The bishop insists on the need to clearly define the powers of the «First in Honor» Patriarch and to decide whether the canons adopted in the Byzantine era have sufficient force in the context of globalization and the Internet.

At the end of his speech, the Metropolitan called on the Local Churches to sit down at the negotiating table not to formally exchange accusations, but to create a new conciliar mechanism that is binding on all. Only such an approach, according to the hierarch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, will allow to overcome the current crisis and avoid the final collapse of the Orthodox world.

Earlier, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople said that he was not going to convene a Pan-Orthodox Council on the issue of Ukrainian autocephaly.